World’s hungry top one billion: UN food agency

ROME (AFP) — A record one billion people are undernourished around the world, the UN food agency said Friday, blaming the global financial crisis for a surge of more than 100 million hungry since last year.

Deploring “the biggest ever year-on-year increase” in world hunger, Jacques Diouf, the head of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), told a news conference: “One in six human beings does not have access to food.”

The FAO chief called for a “new world food order” enshrining the “right to food and thus the right to exist,” urging stepped-up investment in agriculture.

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Some three weeks ahead of the Group of Eight wealthy nations’ summit in Italy, Diouf said: “The problem of food security is a political one. It’s a question of priorities on the world agenda.”

Josette Sheeran, head of the UN World Food Programme (WFP), recalled food riots in several developing countries in the past two years and warned at the same news conference: “A hungry world is a dangerous world.”